He’d never seen her passports. He had no idea what identity she was using.
He threw his laptop across the room.
From the back of the house, Max wailed. His phone rang. Brenda Tierney, mobile. He clicked on. “Where are you?”
“LAX. Meet me at the Encounter. I’m waiting for you.” In the background he heard voices, clatter.
“What did you do?”
“Time’s wasting, darlin’. I’m here. I’ll explain everything. I’m at the Encounter. I’ll wait for you in the bar.”
“What—?” It went dead.
“Brenda? Brenda?”
He ran to his car, jammed the key into the ignition, and sped away from the curb.
She wouldn’t call him if she meant to steal it. It must have been a mistake at the bank. Or maybe he’d entered the password wrong after all. With everything that had happened, he could have just been confused. He might have entered the password for one of the other accounts instead of the Nevis account.
He eased off the accelerator. Slow down. The last thing you want is to attract attention. She called you. There’s no reason for her to call if she doesn’t want you. She wants you. Nothing’s changed. Maybe she changed the password for security. With thirty million dollars going in, it’s not a bad idea to put in a fresh password. Why would she call if she didn’t want you?
He turned onto Manchester. LAX was only a few minutes away. He’d park at the airport, meet her in the restaurant. He could still make the flight out of San Diego. He had seven hours to get down there before takeoff. Then on to Switzerland. Meet her there, and freedom.
Oh, come on. You’re a fool. You know this is all wrong. You know she’s had you pegged from the minute she laid eyes on you. She played you from the first day, with her eyes and her lips. With every motion of that body she was playing you. Every stitch of clothes she put on to play you.
Horns blared. A truck headed for his door. Smoke billowed from its tires. He wrenched the steering wheel and punched the gas. He waited for the collision.
The truck missed him by inches. He’d blown through a red light.
Get yourself killed. That’s the idea. Why leave one more Dunn on the planet? The other two are already gone.
He made his left on Aviation. A jet cruised overhead. Another mile, and he waited for his turn to make a right onto Century. Traffic was absurd. All these people flying around for a turkey dinner. It would take forever for the four cars ahead of him to get onto Century and for him to find his own break.
You were ripe for it. She picked you like an apple off a tree. Unhappy at home, a cheating wife . . .
Brenda had forged Casey Flynn’s signature. She’d copied everything else on the copier, but that signature was original. She hadn’t practiced Casey’s signature once. He was sure of it. She forged it in an instant.
It was an act. All of it was an act. The signature practice, the poor renditions she’d done early on. Randy’s signature was perfect. CFO underneath it matched his lettering. She hadn’t needed any practice.
Serena never wrote that letter.
He laid into the horn. “Get moving!”
In five minutes he was on Century, cutting between cars, and in another ten he was running past the curved arches of the Theme Building. The elevator doors opened into the restaurant, and he walked into the futuristic cartoon of the place. Blue lights in the ceiling floated like gigantic amoebas overhead.
He marched into the bar. The place was packed. His eyes swept for Brenda. Two blondes, but neither one had the face of the girl he wanted.
“Hi, Jason.”
He turned. It wasn’t Brenda. Black hair, spiked short on top. A tattoo of a snake with wings on the side of her neck. Gold looped earrings marched up the edge of one ear.
“Do I know you?” He scanned the crowd for Brenda.
“No. But you used to.”
He looked in her eyes. Green. His knees weakened. “Danah.”
62
“I didn’t recognize you. . . . I . . . it’s been . . .” He was going to try to add up the years, but with the shock of seeing her here, when he was looking for Brenda, looking for answers, the concepts of simple mathematics escaped him.
He didn’t want to think about the last time he saw Danah. He tried to connect these green eyes to the girl she had been before that night, before everything changed, before what happened in the back of that bar. The girl before that night was strong, confident. She had a way of walking that was so graceful every movement could have been set to music.
This woman was different. The features were still there, the set of her nose and the swell of her cheekbones below those hypnotic eyes. But something was lost. In the drawn implosion of her face, the way her skin hugged her skull, the wiry cut of her shoulders, something elemental in this woman had changed from the girl he’d known.
“It’s great to see you, Danah.” He thought to put a hand on her arm, but the appraising look in her eyes kept his hands at his sides.
“I have a table.” She tilted her head to direct him, and the gesture was familiar. She might have been leading him in a walk across the quad to trigonometry.
Before she could step away, he spoke. “Wait. I’m meeting someone.” He looked over the crowd again. No Brenda.
Danah stepped close. “She’s not coming.”
Her eyes glimmered in the blue lights from the ceiling, watching him with great care. Now a smile began to emerge, hidden underneath a frown.
“What do you mean? What are you talking about?”
“This way.” She began to move away.
Jason clutched her arm. He meant to demand an explanation, but before he could speak again, she spun on him. She grasped his thumb and twisted it. His hand lost its grip as he turned to release the pressure, his elbow and shoulder forced inward and around. He fell to one knee.
Looking down at him as he knelt, she said, “How ironic,” and released his thumb. She moved away.
Jason jumped up. His thumb and shoulder throbbed. He moved through the crowd and caught sight of Danah cutting through, on the way to a corner table.
A tourist stood in front of him. “Get out of the way.” Jason shoved past him.
Danah slid into a booth and took up her glass. She downed its black contents and signaled for the waitress.
He reached her table. He looked around for Brenda.
“Sit down, Jason. What are you drinking these days?” Danah gestured with a nod to the seat across from her.
The waitress held a circular tray level, empty. It struck him as absurd that she would hold the tray that way when she carried no glasses or plates. She lifted her eyebrows at him.
He collapsed into the padded seat. Danah. It had been twenty years.
“I guess he’s not drinking. I’ll have another one of these.”
The waitress shrugged and moved off.
Danah turned her attention to Jason. “If you put your hands on me again, I’ll break your arm.”
“What did you mean when you said she’s not coming?”
“Oh, you think your little scheme is still on, don’t you? For a guy who’s had so much success in business, you sure are dense.”
He sat back.
The waitress appeared with the drink. Danah thanked her and sipped it. The snake tattoo on her neck writhed with each swallow. She turned back to him.
“I followed your career. You did well.” Another sip. Another clenching of the winged snake. “But that’s over now.”
He couldn’t keep himself from looking through the crowd. Brenda had called him. Danah must have it wrong. Why would Brenda call him if she didn’t still love him?
“Look at me, Jason. I told you—she’s not coming.”
Green eyes. Brenda had blond hair, like Danah used to have. He’d known there was some elemental connection between Danah and Brenda, a subtle similarity in the flesh of their faces. He’d always seen it. It was one of the things that first attracted him to Brenda. He’d
known that.
Like a carousel rotating to a stop, his mind settled on a truth. An evening twenty years ago, picking Danah up one night. While he waited in the foyer of her father’s house, a little girl peeked down at him like a caged sparrow from behind the banister upstairs. Her small fists gripped the posts. Blond hair. Eyes a shade unmistakable in the light from the chandelier.
“Your sister.”
“Now you’re getting it.”
“Diane”
Danah took a sip. Writhing snake. “Very good.”
Jason wanted to run. He looked up again, no longer expecting Brenda—Diane. Now he expected to see uniformed cops approaching. Or FBI agents in cheap suits bulging under the armpit.
“Look at me, Jason.”
Her eyes. He could stare into them for eternity. Despite the narrowness of her body now, the shrunken leanness, those eyes still glowed. He said, “This was all about you.”
“Not everyone’s as self-absorbed as you are, Jason.” She opened her phone. “I only have a couple more minutes. It’ll take a while to get through security on a busy night like this.” She closed the phone.
She sipped her drink again. Jason was transfixed by the snake tattooed on her neck. The wings moved whenever Danah turned her head.
“Before I leave, you need to know what you did to my family,” she said. “After that night, my mom and dad fought all the time. They couldn’t handle what you let happen to me. They split up, and Mom took us back to Pennsylvania. Back to Westmoreland, her hometown. That’s where Diane met the real Brenda Tierney. I went into treatment. Our brother Dante, remember him? He was dead a year later from an overdose. Diane was the only one who held it together. Are you listening, Jason?”
Jason nodded. He lifted his eyes from staring at the smooth texture of the ice cubes melting in her glass. Tired. He was very, very tired. No sleep. Constant vigilance about this plan. It had caught up to him, and now he didn’t want to hear any more. His father was dead. Philip was dead. Brenda was a little girl named Diane watching him from a perch above.
“It was her idea. She found something about you on the Internet. Some award you got from a charity six or seven years ago. What was it? Something about family, youth?”
He kept nodding. It was a mechanical motion now. They were right about him, all of them. Kathy, Miles, Serena. His wife’s words echoed in his mind. “You’ve lined your walls with plaques showing all the ways you’ve tried to make up for it, but you can’t.”
“It made us sick. You of all people, being honored. After what you did.”
He turned to her. “You had your part too, you know. I didn’t exactly drag you away that night.”
“This isn’t about me. You’re not hearing me at all. I thought we were starting our life together. But all you wanted was to get rid of your problem. I didn’t want an abortion. I was such a fool. I wanted you. You. And your baby. Well, you got your wish. Not exactly a surgical abortion, but I lost the baby all right.”
“You went into that bar. I tried to keep you in the car.”
“I had to get away from you somehow.” Those green eyes were framed in red now, tears rimming the black-painted lids. She rubbed away the tears before they could get all the way down her cheeks.
“I stopped it, didn’t I? I risked my life stopping it.”
“You were too late. You waded in there with the bartender’s baseball bat and took them out, but you were too late.” Her teeth clenched. “And you let your poor brother take the fall for you.”
The hatred in her eyes was deeper than any love he had ever seen in them.
“He wanted to. Dad wanted him to.”
“Does that work for you? Telling yourself that?”
“It was his choice. He wanted to do it for me.”
“And you let him. Didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
“I didn’t see you stopping him, Danah. You didn’t come forward.”
“I was in no shape to testify. I was in no shape to do anything.” She fumbled with her purse. Her fingernails were black. She leafed a bunch of bills out. Fives and ones. The fives were crisp. New bills, the portrait of Lincoln offset without the circle around him, not the old Lincoln fives. She slapped them onto the table.
“Now Phil’s dead. His blood’s on your hands, Jason. Every drop of it. And the blood of our baby. On your hands.” She slid away. “I have a plane to catch.”
For twenty years he’d thought of her. It couldn’t end like this. He reached out for her. “Wait. Don’t go.”
“Keep your hands off me. I’m warning you.” She stood away from the booth.
“But I never meant for any of this . . . I wanted . . . I wanted . . .”
She leaned over the table, close, those green eyes hating, hating. He smelled the rum on her breath when she said, “Yeah, you wanted.”
She stepped away, and the crowd filtered between them, and she was gone.
Absently, as he watched people file past, Jason’s fingers went to the bills she’d left on the table. He stroked the texture of the paper between his thumb and fingers. He brought a five to his nose and inhaled the scent. It brought memories back to him. Of a twelve-year-old boy with his brother, counting up paper-route collections in their room. Phil making fun of him for being so serious. But the bills had fired his imagination back then. He’d imagined that cash at the centers of dramas of commerce, corruption, theft—heart-breaking plots. As a boy, he pictured bills in stacks passed hand to hand by shadow-jawed thugs or packed into briefcases or tossed into the air in jubilation.
Federal Reserve notes. On the front of the five was the portrait of the man who had abolished one kind of slavery. Offset from center in their own special shade of green, serial numbers were printed. He’d learned the meaning of the numbers a decade later when he went through his bank training—the code duplicated on the bill, surrounded by other letters and numbers equally mystifying to him as a boy, along with the inscription that these notes were legal for all debts. On their reverse sides, the bills portrayed buildings in the nation’s capital, or on the single, the great seal of the United States, whose inscrutability added to his fascination: a pyramid with a glowing eye at its peak.
And more improbable than all those symbols and notations, contrary to every other impression on the bills, across the top in bold letters blazed words like a carryover or some kind of concession: IN GOD WE TRUST.
“Jason.”
He looked up. The man’s shirt was green and red with pictures of surfboards and island girls leaning against palm trees. That was supposed to be Jason’s life. On a beach, on a small island with the fragrance of the sea and mangoes blended in the air. His island girl was supposed to be a blonde.
Hathaway chewed at his gum.
Coach stood next to him, looking like he’d just lost a game against his cross-town rival.
Behind the parole officers, in crisp black uniforms, stood three LAPD officers.
The crowd stayed well back.
Tom Cole said, “Your girl told us we’d find you here. Where is she?”
Jason pointed to the island scene on Hathaway’s shirt. “There.”
The parole officers looked at one another.
Tom Cole said to Hathaway, “I hate it when you’re right.”
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Acknowledgements
Mona, thanks for putting up with the early nights and early mornings, and for always supporting my dreams no matter how far-fetched.
Daniel, you’re an inspiration to me. Thanks for your encouragement and understanding.
Dad, thanks for instilling in me a love of reading and an appreciation for the fun of language—especially “bad” language.
To my talented writing pals Shawn Grady, Kathryn Cushman, Mark Young, and Carrie Padgett—thanks for your advice and support. It kept me answering the bell many mornings.
My writing mentors, in particular T.C. Boyle and James Scott Bell, have been of more help to me than they can possibly imagine.
Janet Grant, thank you for your guidance and direction as my agent. You’ve invested far more in me than I’ll ever be able to return.
Sergeant Ken Whitley, the time you devoted to answering my questions about parolees and parole agents was tremendously valuable to my characterizations of Flip Dunn, Tom Cole, and Brad Hathaway. Any mistakes are mine.
Judge Charles D. Sheldon, I appreciate your patience with my questions about the legal system and how certain cases and sentences might be considered. Again, any mistakes are mine.
In thousands of ways, my pastors Mark Foreman, Orville Stanton, Chuck Butler, Lonnie Anderson, and John Jones have kept my eyes focused on the most valuable prize and encouraged me to follow the calls of Christ.
To all my colleagues at Square 1 Bank, thanks for your support and enthusiasm for this endeavor. I’m so glad we have none of the dysfunctions of the fictional Business Trust Bank.
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